Toronto - Canada - March 08 - 2013 - A new study from Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health pins Canadians among the world’s heaviest drinkers. The study which was published online this week in the journal Addiction claims Canadians drink more than 50 per cent above the average of our fellow earthlings. Data from 2005 showed Canadians to knock back 9.9 litres of pure alcohol per person each year compared to the global average of 6.1 litres per person reports the Toronto Star. Based on CAMH’s statistics, this places Canadians in a heavyweight category that includes Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain – populations that have traditionally had far more practice in the drinking department. Researchers who studied alcohol consumption in 241 countries were looking to establish patterns in the relationship between alcohol and the global burden of disease. They learned that alcohol is now the third leading cause of death worldwide, exceeded only by high blood pressure and smoking.

"Alcohol consumption has been found to cause more than 200 different diseases and injuries," the study’s lead author Kevin Shield says in a press release. "These include not only well-known outcomes of drinking such as liver cirrhosis or traffic accidents, but also several types of cancer, such as female breast cancer." Shield and his team analyzed data on alcohol consumption by country from 2005. Then they estimated figures for 2010 by looking at sales, population surveys and alcohol consumption records. Unfortunately, the researchers calculations for both years only included what went on record. Nearly 30 per cent of alcohol consumed in 2005 went unlisted, whether it was a home-brewed concoction that could knock out an entire field of cattle or illegally produced alcohol reminiscent of the prohibition days. "The amount of unrecorded alcohol consumed is not impacted by public health alcohol policies such as taxation which has the effect of moderating consumption. Unrecorded alcohol consumption is a particular problem." says Dr. Jürgen Rehm, author and director of CAMH's Social and Epidemiological Research Department. The researchers also noted unhealthy drinking practices in regions like Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa where people often drink to intoxication. They go on alcohol binges and they don’t eat while drinking. By contrast, people in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia consumed the least alcohol. In Canada, we are noted for binge drinking when many citizens consume rather large quantities of spirits, wine and beer.

Beer drinkers benefit from the great taste of beer plus the effects of dopamine

Toronto - Canada - April 15 - 2012 - Coming home from a long day at work, sometimes there's nothing better than sitting down and enjoying a nice refreshing glass of beer. According to new study, the pleasure you get from that beer, specifically the rush of dopamine in your brain, may be as much from the taste as it is from the alcohol content. The researchers scanned the brains of 49 men while they were given small amounts of their favourite beer (just enough to taste it), as well as water and Gatorade. Even though the men reported that the Gatorade tasted the best of the three options, the brain scans showed that the release of dopamine, a chemical associated pleasure and reward, was highest when the men sampled the beer. The participants also reported cravings for beer after tasting it but they did not have similar cravings for the water or Gatorade.

"We believe this is the first experiment in humans to show that the taste of an alcoholic drink alone, without any intoxicating effect from the alcohol, can elicit this dopamine activity in the brain's reward centres," said Dr. David Kareken, the deputy director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Centre and lead author of the research paper, according to a statement.

The study also noted a higher dopamine response in those men who reported having a history of alcoholism in their family, supporting the idea that alcoholism may be hereditary. The increased craving for beer experienced by the participants also supports research that factors closely associated with alcohol consumption, (the smell of it, taste of it or even the sight of it), can cause cravings and relapses in recovering alcoholics.

Dopamine has long been linked to addictive behaviour, especially in those that suffer from low-dopamine levels as a result of genetics. These low-dopamine levels can cause a predisposition towards addiction, although they don't necessarily predict addiction since environmental factors also play a large role. The study was published April 15 -2012 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.